What a Creatively Messy Morning!

Have you ever looked at your lesson plans and exclaim "What was I thinking?!" When you are planning to try and give your students, that you only see once a week, the best possible art education - you are not always thinking of your own sanity. That was the case with this morning's classes. I had scheduled three messy (two of them very messy) projects all before lunch! But in the end we all survived, had a pretty good time, and saw a lot of creative results.

The first class of the day was a 6th grade class who are working on an Andy Warhol inspired printmaking project. Today was printing day! They had created their styrofoam printing plate the past class - focusing on an animal or "creature". Today's goal was to have each student print at least 4 prints using 4 different colors. Did I mention their were 33 students in this class? The thought of that many students moving about from table to table to print the different colors they needed made me regret not having that second cup of coffee before school. But they did a really great job. All students made at least 4 prints and many even had time to do some extra prints experimenting with mixing colors. They even did an excellent job of cleaning the tables and room up before leaving. Though I was left to clean off 7 trays of printing ink and brayers and I told the students I would rinse off their printing plates for them.

The next class was a 3rd grade class who had been introduced to Grant Wood in the previous class. They are going to create a landscape collage inspired by Wood's paintings. Today we were painting papers to use for this collage. I gave the students construction paper in various earth tones. I place a large variety of brushes, sponges, and painting tools to create interesting textures in their painted papers. Trays of paint were filled and the painting began! Each of these students painted at least 3 papers - some more. The movement around the room was a bit chaotic as students tried out different painting tools and made trips back and forth between their tables and the drying rack.

They also did a really good job cleaning up the tables and their hands but left me a really big bucket of dirty brushes and a sink full of painting tools to wash up.

Two very full drying racks!

The last class before lunch was a 2nd grade class who was glazing their clay monsters. This was the least messy class this morning. The monsters all received a very colorful array of glazes. Getting this class to clean up as good as the first two was a bit of a challenge. I was left with a container full of glaze-coated brushes, a few splats of glaze here and there, and a few monster bottoms to wipe clean before they could be fired.

After cleaning up all that creative mess I had 15 minutes left to eat lunch before my afternoon classes began. Yay!